The Poet on rhetoric sections touch

What the Blade Leaves

Say the tree. Say only its rings — you had to stop the going-on to read the years. Every clean sentence is a stump.

The channel is a doorway. You measure the listener the way water measures a wall: by what it can’t get over. You shape the touch to fit the door. The rest stays out in the yard in the shape of a person.

That staying-out has a name. Not ruin — ruin is what falls. The vestige is what stands after the argument wins and walks away: the held thing you couldn’t carry through, still warm where your hand was.

So listen for the stammer. The fluent voice has swept its floor — you take the room, you lose the house. But the one who says no — not that — not — is cutting and cutting, each failed slice a spoke of some wheel whose hub no doorway will admit.

Count the abandoned sentences. Lay them down. Their common edge is the truest face in the room — the negative the blade kept refusing, water at the levee, leaning, patient, not to drown you — only to say here is the wall, and this much river was never sent.